Sunny Murray

Cecil Taylor Unit: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9,1980 First Visit

by Chris May
April 30, 2024

More faux-intellectual codswallop has been written about Cecil Taylor than about any other jazz musician, dead or alive. He has been, and continues to be, misrepresented as an arcane Einsteinian theorist by a cult whose members are afraid of visceral reactions to his art (or to anyone else's). But Taylor's work demands a visceral response. It has nothing to do with rational thought and everything to do with emotion and physicality. Sadly, the nonsense that has been written about his ...

Clifford Thornton: Ketchaoua Revisited + Arthur Jones Trio: Scorpio

by Alberto Bazzurro
January 30, 2024

Clifford Thornton è una di quelle figure rimaste fin troppo fra le pieghe della mitologia (sia detto ovviamente senza alcun intento ironico) free, e più ancora il pressoché sconosciuto altosassofonista Arthur Jones, l'uno nato a Philadelphia nel 1936 e scomparso nel 1989, l'altro nato a Cleveland nel 1940 e morto nel 1998. Questa preziosa ristampa, che allinea i dischi d'esordio in proprio di entrambi, editi a suo tempo dalla leggendaria Byg Actuel, l'uno, Ketchaoua, nel 1969, l'altro, Scorpio, due anni ...

Albert Ayler: Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited

by Giuseppe Segala
January 15, 2024

Tra gli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta del Novecento, una vorticosa accelerazione spinse le arti e alimentò la creatività verso esplorazioni audaci, esprimendo personalità e individualità di valore universale. Autentico visionario, tra urlo febbrile e tenera carezza, tra ruvida e profonda adesione alle radici afroamericane e tensione verso il futuro, tra riferimenti tematici trasfigurati, inni religiosi, marce bandistiche e dense campiture di puro suono che hanno la forza dell'espressionismo astratto, Albert Ayler attraversò come una meteora il firmamento della musica neroamericana, ...

Albert Ayler: More Lost Performances Revisited

by Chris May
November 15, 2023

A state-of-the-art sonic restoration of obscure but historically important Albert Ayler material by Switzerland's ezz-thetics label, which with its parent label, Hat Hut, has been creating an audiophile archive of Ayler recordings with the support of his estate since 1978. All too often, “more" in an album title means “Beware: barrel scraping in progress." Not in this case. More Lost Performances Revisited is primetime Ayler. The disc draws from three sources over a five-year timespan. The earliest ...

Albert Ayler: Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited

by Chris May
April 2, 2023

This landmark reissue contains consummately remastered cuts of the killer (among killers) track from Albert Ayler's relatively unknown My Name Is Albert Ayler (Debut 1964) plus the justly celebrated Spiritual Unity (ESP-Disk, 1965) in its entirety. Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited starts with “Summertime" from the 1964 album. In his survey The Jazz Standards (Oxford University Press, 2012), Ted Gioia writes that over 400 jazz covers of George and Ira Gershwin's song were recorded in the 1950s ...

Albert Ayler: New York Eye and Ear Control Revisited

by Mark Corroto
August 10, 2021

The backstory of New York Ear and Eye Control is a significant factor in the music and the direction free jazz took in the 1960s. Filmmaker Michael Snow commissioned Albert Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray to record a thirty-minute soundtrack for a movie, “Walking Woman," he had yet to film. As explained in the liner notes, he “wanted to buy a half hour of music." Also invited to the session were trumpeter & cornetist Don ...

Albert Ayler: New York Eye And Ear Control Revisited

by Chris May
July 30, 2021

The development of so-called free jazz in New York during the first half of the 1960s was topped and tailed by three landmark recordings: Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse, 1966) and Albert Ayler's New York Eye And Ear Control (ESP, 1966). Of the three discs, only New York Eye And Ear Control broke away completely from jazz's normative structure of theme/solos/theme. Commissioned as an art-film soundtrack, Ayler's recording was also the product of an altogether ...

Sunny Murray Meets Sonic Liberation Front on High Two CD

Source: Gapplegate Music Review by Grego Edwards
June 25, 2011

The student of the music we call jazz at some point must come to terms with the impact of the avant-garde from the '60s onwards. Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, later John Coltrane, and the musicians who associated with him brought about a vast infusion of musical vocabulary and ways of speaking into improvisational practice. Looking back we can see that regardless of the rhetoric let lose in the years that followed, the innovations of these important artists have ...
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Sunny Murray in Duet with Sabir Mateen: "We Are Not at the Opera," 1998

Source: Gapplegate Music Review by Grego Edwards
May 4, 2011

Many if not most of the readers of this blog will know that drummer Sunny Murray is the godfather of “free" drumming. He played with critically important improvisers of the new thing musical explosion in the early sixties (like Ayler, Taylor) and he developed a uniquely effective “freetime" style, one that rarely stated an overt pulse, but proffered a running commentary and complement to the solos and bass punctuations. That's textbook fact. But listen to him in an especially exposed ...
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Sonic Liberation Front Meets Sunny Murray (High Two, 2011)

Source: Music and More by Tim Niland
April 9, 2011

Drummer Sunny Murray is a legend in avant-garde jazz circles, performing with everyone from Albert Ayler to Cecil Taylor, as well as recording several sessions as a leader. An accidental phone call led him to get together with the Philadelphia based ensemble Sonic Liberation Front, and it was a fortuitous meeting for all concerned.

This disc is split between two sessions, the first half from a studio meeting in 2008, and then the second half of the disc was recorded ...
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Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet + Sunny Murray Factor in Philadelphia

Source: All About Jazz
October 19, 2005

Ars Nova Workshop presents: Thursday, October 20 | 8pm TAYLOR HO BYNUM SEXTET with Taylor Ho Bynum, cornet Matt Bauder, tenor sax/clarinet Mary Halvorson, guitar Evan O'Reilly, guitar Jessica Pavone, viola/electric bass Tomas Fujiwara, drums “He is one of those once-in-a-lifetime talents who can play everything and always sound like himself. Remarkable technique, inventiveness, energy...Bynum can really 'talk' with that horn of his and ...
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